Читать книгу Between Dream Houses and "God's Own Junkyard": Architecture and the Built Environment in American Suburban Fiction - Stefanie Strebel - Страница 6

The 1920s – the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age, as they are often referred to – are a crucial period in the history of American suburbia. It was in this decade that the suburbs experienced a first boom, with roughly 900,000 homes built each year between 1920 and 1927, and the decade ending with one in six Americans living in this rising geographical, social and architectural environment (Kushner 7).1 In fact, at the beginning of the decade, the US government set its sights on housing every family in their own detached dwelling, with the idea being strongly popularised in the media. However, suburbia was still a marginal phenomenon, especially in terms of cultural relevance, and the demarcations between city and country were much clearer than in the second suburban boom taking place in the postwar period. Stevenson (4) even goes as far as to claim that in the 1920s, “[t]here were, practically speaking, no suburbs.” This statement is misleading, however. While the American suburbs of the 1920s might not have had the stereotypical appearance of those of the 1950s and 1960s, the process of metropolitanisation was in full swing, and the outskirts were growing at a faster rate than their inner cities (Barrow 200). According to architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright (195), they were even growing twice as rapidly, and mass production of residential developments, although commonly associated with the postwar period, was also practised in the 1920s, when “[e]ntire blocks were laid out with quaint Mission bungalows or enticing English cottages.” As Harris and Larkham (1) emphasise, the perception that the development of the suburbs is, in essence, a postwar phenomenon, and that the touchstone decade is the 1950s, is based on half-truths and myths.

In fact, the United States embarked on its suburbanisation much earlier than the twentieth century. Historically, the country has always had an “anti-urban bias,” and suburban settlements and their commercial infrastructure “arose from the idea, rather peculiar to America, that neither the city nor the country was really a suitable place to live” (Kunstler 40). A convenient way to illustrate the development of the American suburb is to distinguish between four rough phases or eras, as proposed by Baldassar (476-478): the pre-industrial, the early urban-industrial, the late urban-industrial and the metropolitan era. In the pre-industrial era, there were few suburban settlements with sparse populations; it can be considered a sleeper phase. The division between city and country was still strong, as people were unable to cover long distances to travel to work on a daily basis. In the early urban-industrial era – which the 1920s are part of –, however, suburbanisation was a far more rapid process, as white-collar workers moved out of the cities into their close vicinity in increasing numbers. As Christopher Hitchens remarks in a 2008 article for The Atlantic, “agrarian population moves as soon as it can to the cities, and then consummates the process by evacuating the cities for the suburbs” (122). When it comes to demographics, the inhabitants of suburbia were predominantly white, middle-class and family-oriented at the time. They were attracted by the almost utopian or at least escapist discourse surrounding suburbia in the early urban-industrial era, which promoted this environment as a solution to various problems encountered in the urban sphere.

The American suburb was not without its critics in the early urban-industrial era, however. In fact, the criticism that still defines the suburban discourse in the arts already began to be heard in the nineteenth century, for instance in the following passage of Henry A. Beers’ short story “A Suburban Pastoral” (1894) – a sarcastic title for a text in which the disappearing rural landscape is bemoaned:

There is one glory of the country and another glory of the town, but there is a limbo or ragged edge between which is without glory of any kind. It is not yet town – it is no longer country. Hither are banished slaughter pens, chemical and oil works, glue factories, soap boilers, and other malodorous nuisances. […] Land, which was lately sold by the acre, is now offered by the foot front; and no piece of real estate is quite sure whether it is still part of an old field or has become a building lot. Rural lands and turnpikes have undergone metamorphosis into “boulevards,” where regulation curbstones prophesy future sidewalks, and thinly scattered lamp-posts foretell a coming population. […] [T]he cows have disappeared, and pasture and orchard – where a few surviving apple trees stretch their naked arms to heaven – have passed into unfenced lots intersected by diagonal paths, short cuts of tin-pailed mechanics; bediamonded in the centre by local ball nines, who play the national game there on Saturdays (and eke, it is to be feared, on Sundays); and browsed by the goat – cow of the suburb. (5-6)

Beers depicts the American suburb as a space in-between at the turn of the twentieth century, as a place that destroys the rural pastoral and is devoid of the benefits of the city. At that time, it was a space in transition, still striving to find its purpose and aesthetic. The excerpt above mirrors the accelerating growth of suburbia, in the context of which much was built without proper planning, and which thus paved the way for the eclectic suburban architectural and social landscape of today.

Other sources, too, emphasise the fact that the suburban history of the United States began considerably earlier than with the mass production of tract housing in the postwar years. According to Blakely and Snyder (14), industrialisation – in addition to fostering urbanisation – also spawned suburbanisation, so that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there emerged a middle class which quickly found its way out of the urban cores. Brooklyn Heights, Long Island, the Bronx and Yonkers, for instance, were suburbs of Manhattan, and by 1911, more than one in three lawyers resided on the periphery of this central borough. Stern, Fishman and Tilove report in their book Paradise Planned that by the 1880s, roughly 300,000 people commuted between New York City and its surrounding suburbs, and they quote a New York Times article from 1878 which states that “the continuous region from twenty to thirty miles around is little else than a vast dormitory of New York” (qtd. in Stern, Fishman and Tilove 47). However, back then, American suburbia had a different appearance and different social characteristics compared to its current form, as becomes obvious in the following observations made by historian Lewis Mumford after a walk through Brooklyn in 1921: “It was a little hard to realize that this dissolute landscape, this no-man’s-land which was neither town nor country, was part and parcel of the greatest city on the continent. It seemed to me that I had passed through the twilight zone of an essentially suburban civilization” (“Wilderness” 44). Hence, in some instances, American suburbia was still considered a no-man’s-land, a mysterious twilight zone, a wilderness. It is the suburban landscape of the postwar period that is responsible for the suburban myth, a myth “which poised that suburbs are homogeneous landscapes of white middle-class conformity and uniformity” (Dunham-Jones and Williamson 17). The emerging suburbs of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were architecturally more diverse, which is the main reason they are often not thought of as proper suburbs from a present-day point of view; they do not comply with the image conveyed by the suburban myth.

The Suburb as an Anti-Urban Utopia

Although they were less stereotypical in appearance, the suburbs were clearly on the rise in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and the suburban growth of the 1920s was particularly pronounced. With the Roaring Twenties being the first decade in which more Americans lived in urban than in rural areas, cities began to feel crowded with regard to both population and architecture, and there was a growing discomfort with the urban sphere among large numbers of city dwellers. There was also an increasing dissatisfaction with the modern characterless architecture that had begun to dominate urban territories, so that the newly marketed picture of the detached dwelling became more and more appealing. In King Vidor’s 1928 silent film The Crowd, for instance, the vision of a quiet family home away from the noise of the city is what prompts the protagonist to propose to his partner, and on the train journey to their honeymoon destination, he shows her an advertisement for a model home in a magazine and tells her that this is where they would live. The suburbs thus undoubtedly had a strong appeal even before they began to be marketed on a larger scale, and people felt the urge to escape the crowded American cities with their increasingly oppressive high-rise architecture.

The notion of strongly and oppressively vertical architecture is one among many urban characteristics against which prospective suburbanites reacted. From an architectural and economic perspective, the often-criticised high-rise seemingly became a necessity in the light of booming land prices in cities such as New York and Chicago, but more often than not, high-rises were built out of sheer megalomania, as well as in order to transmit a semiotic message. Edgell (358) insists that “[m]en build skyscrapers because they like skyscrapers. They concentrate them in a district because they like so to concentrate them.” Ignoring all considerations regarding their impact on the individual, high-rises stand as status symbols of individual cities or even entire nations, and they are a translation of political and economic power into the built environment. At the beginning of the twentieth century, buildings grew taller and taller, more often than not in a sculptural and massive style, and were in increasing competition with one another.2 As Frank Lloyd Wright argues, the high-rise or, in order to maintain the Babylonian notion, the skyscraper “demoralizes its neighbors, when it does not rob them, compelling them to compete in kind or perish” (on Architecture 98) – and this demoralisation and increasing architectural competition soon began to mirror itself in the urban population, causing unease and discomfort with regard to the architectural city. As a consequence, urban flight became a new phenomenon.

In addition to the birth of the high-rise, Futurism had emerged in Europe as a pro-urban movement with utopian ideas relating to the look of the modern city, and this movement strongly influenced Art Deco, a style commonly found in the high-rise architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. Futurism emphasised the rejection of tradition and was inspired by the symbol of the machine (Tod and Wheeler 131) – a symbol that was incorporated into the arts in terms of both utopianism and dystopianism, for instance, by Fritz Lang in his 1927 film Metropolis. Futurists dismissed traditional cities and embraced the appearance and character of modern urban settlements (Tod and Wheeler 133). They felt that modern life was not represented by cathedrals or palaces anymore, and that train stations, immense streets, big hotels and glittering arcades were closer to their reality. Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia, for instance, thought that architects needed to invent a dynamic city resembling a gigantic shipyard, with Futurist houses looking like enormous machines. He conjured up ornament-free houses of cement, glass and iron, exceptionally brutish in their mechanical simplicity. He dreamt of streets that would plunge several floors into the earth, collecting the traffic within the metropolis and connecting it to high-speed conveyor belts (Frampton 87-88).

Apart from megalomaniac, massive and oppressive building styles, as well as the threateningly utopian concepts of Futurist architects, a further modern urban characteristic that was met with criticism was the unadorned straight line that was part of the architectural utopianism of the 1920s. It was especially Swiss-French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier who promoted the straight line in his collection of essays titled Toward an Architecture (1922) – one of the most influential architectural works of the twentieth century. The author expresses the need to adapt architecture to the age of the machine, which would engender functional and mass-produced, standardised houses – machines for living in. He considers the city to be a tool for ordered modern life and for people fully adapted to industrial society, his maxim being order expressed through geometry:

Man, by reason of his very nature, practises order. [H]is actions and thoughts are dictated by the straight line and the right angle. [T]he straight line is instinctive to him and his mind apprehends it as a lofty object[ive]. [H]e walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going. [T]he modern city lives by the straight line, inevitably; for the construction of buildings, sewers and tunnels, highways and pavements. The circulation of traffic demands the straight line: it is the proper thing for the heart of the city. The curve is ruinous, difficult and dangerous; it is a paralysing thing. The straight line enters into all human history, into all human aims into every human act. [G]eometry is the foundation [and] the material basis on which we build those symbols which represent to us perfection and the divine. (qtd. in Tod and Wheeler 138-139)

While Toward an Architecture served as a manifesto for an entire generation of architects, it was an object of loathing for many. After all, straight lines and a rigid geometry have certain totalitarian and constricting connotations. Perhaps, it can be argued, the conspicuously curvy streets of many suburbs, often ending in cul-de-sacs, are a reaction against the predominance of the straight line and grid patterns in urban planning in the United States.

These disputed developments in the urban environment were certainly not the only factors that encouraged people to seek refuge in the architecturally less overpowering suburbs, however. Economic and technological progress, such as the increasing accessibility of transportation and modern means of communication, changed the way the individual related to space, and distances began to be measured in less mathematical terms. Physical distances became less important, as they could be overcome more easily by means of technology. Hence, both negative push factors and positive pull factors were responsible for the increasing metropolitanisation and suburbanisation of the United States in the 1920s.

When it comes to the discontent regarding living conditions as well as architecture in the cities, it comes as no surprise that utopian ruralist and suburbanist concepts such as the garden suburb, the garden village, the garden enclave or the garden city began to gain popularity in America. Originally promoted and popularised in the late nineteenth century by Ebenezer Howard in his 1898 book Garden Cities of To-morrow, the garden city movement sought to reduce the alienation of the individual from nature caused by the Industrial Age in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, it was a response to the abhorrent living conditions in the country’s industrial cities, as well as to the increasing clash between urbanity and rurality. Similar to the idealised American suburb, the garden city was characterised by a merging of city and nature, by a return to a modernised Arcadia – it was, in the words of Le Corbusier, “a pre-machine-age utopia” (Radiant City 280). In many ways, the garden city can be regarded as a self-sustaining version of the modern suburb, but it was arguably even more idealised and utopian in nature.

Strongly related to Ebenezer Howard’s utopianism is American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s plan of Broadacre City, first presented in his book The Disappearing City (1932). Broadacre City proposed a horizontal dispersion of rural dwellings in which each family would receive a one-acre plot of land; it was “a garden suburb at continental scale, destroying virtually all sense of town” (Stern, Fishman and Tilove 941). Wright’s concept is thus an antithesis of urbanity, an apotheosis of the emerging suburban landscape of the Jazz Age, as well as an “idealistic version of what would become classic suburban sprawl […]” (Kunstler 165). Even though developed at different times and in different geographical contexts, both the garden city and Broadacre City shared the goal of mitigating the clash between city and nature, and of ameliorating urban living conditions within a quasi-suburban framework.

The Birth of the “Dream House” and the Rising Importance of Domestic Space

Owing to the process of urban flight that was encouraged through the suburban promise of a compromise between city and nature, the outer reaches of American cities began to have a greater impact on national culture in the 1920s and played a significant part in the creation of dreams of luxury. Between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression, dreams and aspirations proliferated, as the 1920s “seemed a sort of accidental pause in history, much of it remembered as if it were a willful, elegant sport of time” (Stevenson 1). In the course of the popularisation of the image of a landscape of single-family dwellings, the concept of the “dream house” was born, and owning the dream house became a primary aspiration or life achievement for the American individual. According to architectural historian John Archer, “moving to a house in suburbia is perceived as tantamount to achieving the American dream.” Archer observes that even though there is no precise definition behind the terms “dream house” or “American Dream,” there is a general understanding that they contain the idea of opportunities, and of goals that can be fulfilled: “[The twentieth-century] American dream house has been recognized for a considerable part of its history as a highly specialized instrument for realizing many aspects of bourgeois selfhood” (Archer xv). The residential suburban house became the prime bourgeois locale in America, and an essential part of the self-realisation of the individual. The dream house was and still is an instrument to shape and mirror the bourgeois self, and it is, at least to an extent, an architectural simulacrum thereof. Even though architects had been designing suburban dwellings since the early nineteenth century (Archer 229), the rising suburbanisation of the United States in the 1920s gave suburban architecture a new purpose in that it often served to realise selfhood.

People were exposed to the marketing of the dream house in various cultural domains, and “[t]his exposure helped to raise and multiply the expectations that Americans would have of their dwellings, while at the same time identifying and expanding dimensions in which commodity culture could meet and satisfy those expectations” (Archer 250). There were ever-growing desires relating to domestic architecture among the population, and materialism was allowed to thrive in this context. Thus, even though the suburban boom and enthusiasm of the 1920s certainly did not reach the same dimensions as that after World War II, it undoubtedly signalled and paved the way for the future development of the American landscape – and suburban life and the suburban house became part of the American Dream before this term was even coined.3

Apart from these quasi-utopian developments in terms of architecture and planning, the 1920s were also a crucial period and a time of departure for the development of the suburban self in other domains. Not only did women gain the right to vote at the beginning of the decade and thus become more involved in politics, but also in economic terms, people were faced with new luxuries and commodities in this time of prosperity. Hence, the traditional female role underwent a paradigm shift, with women joining the workforce in increasing numbers owing not only to their newly gained rights but also to the new living standards people sought to achieve; materialism and an emphasis on wealth dominated the decade. In this context, the suburbs are an interesting field of study. Even before the postwar period, the suburbs were the realm of families, particularly of the well-to-do variety – suburbia was largely a landscape of business-oriented husbands and stay-at-home wives. However, with regard to suffrage, the traditional role of the suburban wife and mother was seriously challenged. Furthermore, as the suburbs were generally more affluent than inner cities or rural areas, the phenomenon of materialism and consumerism had a far greater impact on the life and identity of suburbanites. Be it the architecture of their home, the distinct interior design of their dwelling, or modern commodities and appliances, people in the suburbs shaped and fashioned their identity by means of newly acquired modern luxuries.

The domestic interior is a particularly salient realm in this respect, given that interior design gained increasing importance in terms of representing the self between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. According to Downey (5), it was the period between 1880 and 1940 that “witnessed the emergence of the domestic interior as a generative space for modernity.” This period was also when the notion of privacy gained importance in interior design and planning, and when conveniences and technology developed into an important part of the modern design aesthetic.

Generally speaking, the relation between architecture, design, commodities and identity has continuously gained importance over the decades and even centuries, and ever-greater value has been placed on it since the late nineteenth century. As Archer (4) points out, in the nineteenth and twentieth century there was a rapid process transforming domestic architecture, or the private dwelling, into a medium for the construction of individuality. In his book Architecture and Suburbia, Archer addresses the question of how built space – which not only includes architecture, but also man-made landscapes, planning and design – constructs personal identity. The first argument is concerned with how space is used and configured, and how it serves as an “anchor of cognition” from birth. The second argument deals with the built environment as a “selective medium of human practice,” meaning that we consciously decide on what we build and what we do not build, and on how the built environment is used. Archer maintains that “the terms in which spaces are configured and the uses to which those configurations are put serve as apparatuses for inculcating highly particularized systems of social relations and of one’s role within them,” and that “because built spaces shape what people do and how they live in highly specific ways, they also necessarily shape who those people are” (Archer 5).

Archer also points out that architecture and the built environment not only shape the individual, but also the way the individual relates to others. The author uses the gated community as an example – a form of inter-community delimitation –, but the factor of intra-community inclusion or exclusion should not be neglected. The appearance of a dwelling, reaching from architectural style to size to condition, sends out signals to the community, with social status being the most important. We thus establish our position within a community and how we relate to that community through the medium of architecture and design to a large extent. However, architecture not only shapes social relations, as the author goes on to explain, but also “internal states of being and awareness,” such as feelings and affect (Archer 5). It determines how individuals feel about themselves, the space they inhabit, as well as the environment that surrounds them.

Given the ways in which architecture and design shape or mirror identity, it was a common practice in nineteenth-century suburbia to build according to different styles – for instance Tudor or Tuscan – in order to establish the public identity of residents. Furthermore, the configuration of the dwelling, as well as a “properly aestheticized interior,” was used to “shape the very architecture of the resident’s consciousness” (Archer 8). Therefore, it can be argued that while the exterior of a house has a greater impact on public identity, the interior has a greater impact on personal identity. Even though both exterior and interior undoubtedly influence both the public and the private self, the interior is necessarily a less publicly accessible realm, and hence plays a less important role in how an individual is perceived by others. The same holds true for suburban commodities in the early twentieth century, with an expensive car, for instance, sending out signals to the public sphere, whereas modern household appliances primarily nourished the private self.

In spite of the various spheres and means of identity creation, it cannot be denied that limited choice with regard to style and design limits the types of identity that architecture, interior design and commodities create. The question thus arises whether architecture can be held responsible for the perceived standardisation of the masses. Due to the accessibility of and the consensus on status symbols in the Roaring Twenties, for example, there emerged a standardisation of architecture and design, and suburban houses were equipped with the same state-of-the-art appliances. This mass consumption and mass production were blamed for leading to a standardisation of society, as people fashioned their identities by means of the same universally accepted designs and consumer goods. The individual, possibly due to the rising individualism in American society at the time, failed to realise that by fashioning its identity through material possessions, it became itself a mass product. The suburban self increasingly turned into a standard identity, so to speak.

The rising materialism and individualism of the 1920s were met with severe criticism in the arts, especially from the Lost Generation, a group of authors who expressed their disillusion in a highly cynical fashion upon returning from World War I. Their social criticism was aimed at materialism and individualism in the United States in particular, and in both novels discussed in this chapter – Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby –, this criticism is voiced loudly. Even though Sinclair Lewis was not nominally part of the Lost Generation, his writings nonetheless reflect the same concerns regarding the contemporary state and future direction of American society.

Drawing on Babbitt and The Great Gatsby as exemplary representations of suburbia in the 1920s reflects more than the contemporary criticism of emerging (suburban) social trends, however. Two of the most rapidly developing areas in the suburban boom of the 1920s were the Midwest around Chicago and Detroit – two cities strongly marked by their industrial history – and Long Island, or Nassau County in particular. The two novels were thus also chosen due to their geographical background, with Babbitt being set in a fictional Midwestern state named Winnemac, and The Great Gatsby being set on the Great Neck and Cow Neck Peninsula on Long Island. As will be seen, the areas serving as backdrops to the two novels, although rapidly suburbanising at roughly the same time, developed in highly different ways and directions.

In order to respect chronology, the discussion of the relation between the built environment, commodities, design and suburban identity begins with Babbitt, and is followed by a reading of The Great Gatsby within a suburban framework. While Babbitt is unanimously considered a classic of suburban fiction – with readers recognising “the things they lived among: the houses, cars, roads, streets, the outward shapes and colors of people” (Stevenson 101) –, The Great Gatsby is classified as a typical representative of the genre far less often. This is somewhat surprising, since with regard to both time and location, the novel lends itself extraordinarily well to a reading within a suburban framework. While it may not deal with the white-façade-and-picket-fence suburbia that is so commonly a target of ridicule for authors as well as architectural and social critics, the novel should nonetheless be allotted its place in the suburban canon.